Google Analytics: how and why it is important in UX

Google Analytics is important in UX because it shows, with data, how people actually behave on a website or app: where they come from, what they do, where they leave and which actions turn into sales. UX design uses that evidence to decide what to change, so improvements to the experience rest on observed behavior and not on opinion.

Consider the Monday review of a digital director at a regional bank. The new online account-opening flow launched six weeks ago, the design team is proud of it, and the board wants to know why applications are not growing. Opinions fill the room. One executive thinks the form is too long, another blames the advertising, a third believes customers simply prefer the branch. Without evidence, the decision will be made by the most persuasive voice. With analytics, the director can show that most abandonments happen on the identity verification step on mobile devices, and that visitors who arrive from search convert at twice the rate of those arriving from social media. The conversation changes from who is right to what to fix first.

That shift is the real contribution of analytics to user experience. Today the digital world has captured people and companies alike. Customers visit websites to buy products, hire services and look for information, and companies that want to reach them have had to digitize. Analytics tools and user experience design become indispensable because together they establish the operating parameters of a digital strategy. They tell a company what works and what does not, how customers are captured and where they are lost, and how users experience the site, all of which sustain the monetization of e-commerce and the growth of a website or a business.

This article explains what Google Analytics is today, what it can show, how it is set up, how it differs from UX research and why the two should be managed as one discipline. It also covers the limits that executives should keep in mind, since a dashboard can create certainty where there is only correlation.

>> How to create better experiences with your Omnichannel strategy? <<

What is Google Analytics and what does it tell a business?

Google Analytics is a Google platform that reveals the information behind a web page. It shows where visitors come from, how many are visiting, who they are in terms of demographics, whether they arrived through social networks, search or by typing the address, and what conversions resulted from those visits. It points out everything the website alone cannot tell you and that a company needs in order to create strategies that result in revenue.

A point of currency is necessary. The version that most older articles describe, Universal Analytics, no longer exists. According to Google's help center, standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing new hits on July 1, 2023, and access to the old properties and their data ended in July 2024. The current product is Google Analytics 4, which Google describes as a next-generation measurement solution built with privacy at its core. Teams that still rely on Universal Analytics reports are looking at history, and anyone who did not migrate has lost the ability to compare year over year unless the data was exported.

What can you measure with Google Analytics?

The platform offers several groups of information that matter for experience design. It measures the users who visit the page and the interactions they have on it. It identifies the sources that send visitors, including those who type the address directly, and how many come from each. It shows the share of visits that abandon on the home page and on other pages, and it provides demographic information about visitors where Google has enough data to report it. It also measures purchases made by visitors, conversions within the site and the performance of advertising.

In GA4 some of these ideas are expressed differently, and the differences affect interpretation. Bounce rate, for example, is now defined as the percentage of sessions that were not engaged, and an engaged session is one that lasts longer than ten seconds, has a key event or has two or more page or screen views, as Google's documentation on dimensions and metrics explains. Actions that matter to the business are marked as key events, which replaced what used to be called conversions inside the interface. A team that compares an old bounce rate with the new one without knowing this will draw wrong conclusions.

Imagine an online retailer of home goods. In its reports, the product category pages show healthy traffic and a high engagement rate, but the cart page loses a large share of visitors. The data does not say why. It says where to look. The team can then inspect the cart experience, test whether shipping costs appear too late or whether the payment options are limited, and measure the effect of each change. That is analytics serving UX at its best, narrowing a broad problem into a specific one.

A hotel group offers a second illustration. Its booking engine receives visitors from search, from a metasearch site and from email campaigns. The analytics report shows that email visitors book at a far higher rate than the rest, but that metasearch visitors, who are the most numerous, abandon at the room selection step. Marketing might read this as a reason to reduce metasearch spending. A UX review may find instead that metasearch visitors arrive expecting the price they saw on the comparison site, and the room page shows a different total once taxes are added. The right fix is a clearer price presentation, not a cut in budget. The same numbers lead to opposite decisions depending on whether someone asks why.

The practical lesson is that a metric alone should never trigger a budget decision. Pair each number with a question, a hypothesis and a way to test it, and record the outcome. Over a year, that habit creates an institutional memory of what has and has not worked on the company's digital channels, which is far more valuable than any single report.

How is Google Analytics set up and used?

The platform provides a tracking code when the account is created and the web properties are defined. The code, written in JavaScript, must be placed in the code of the web pages so that visits can be recorded and the information gathered. In addition, analytics relies on cookies and similar technologies that the user must accept in many jurisdictions, so that it can collect as much information as possible. This makes the consent banner a business matter, because the data available depends on how many visitors agree to be measured, and a poorly designed banner can reduce the quality of the data.

Setup is only the beginning. The most important decisions are what to measure and what counts as success. A company should define its key events, such as a completed purchase, a submitted quote request or a booked appointment, before reading any report. It should also use consistent campaign parameters in its links so that traffic sources are not lost in the report, which Google itself notes can shift attribution toward direct or organic when parameters are missing. Our work on UX analytics and on marketing analytics starts from those definitions.

Also read this blog: UX Design vs. UI Design

What is UX, and why does analytics need it?

UX, or user experience, is the study of the perceptions and responses that people have when they use a product, in this case a digital one. It conducts studies with people to determine what changes the product needs so that users have experiences that make it stand out and keep them using it. Our article on UX as a lever that drives the entire sales cycle develops the idea in more depth.

The relationship between the two disciplines is one of complementarity. Analytics answers what is happening and how much. UX research answers why. A bank may see that many applicants abandon on a particular step, and only interviews, usability sessions or session recordings will show that the instructions for uploading a document are unclear. In the reverse direction, UX research typically involves a small group of people, and analytics reveals whether what was learned applies to thousands. A company that has only one of the two is either guessing at causes or measuring without understanding. The practice of usability testing in UX design is the natural companion to the numbers.

Read more: Usability Testing in UX Design

Why are UX and Google Analytics important to a company as a whole?

For their many functions, analytics tools help companies establish the parameters for attracting customers and for keeping the relationship with those they already have. They show more about the target user and about what sells best. They are useful for large companies with millions of sales around the world and for micro-businesses that sell in a single country, as well as for video platforms and blogs. Anyone can adapt an account to their website and learn which actions are best for growth. The essential condition is that people within the company know how to analyze the data, since that is the basis of the tool's value.

To perform UX analysis and decide on improvements to a digital product, the team needs to know its buyer persona, summarized as the target customer for a specific product. Analytics helps confirm it with evidence. It also shows which parts of a website are not working, so they can be changed, measured again and compared, and which channels present the product most efficiently. Analytics has become an indispensable part of marketing, community management, sales and customer experience. It is a tool that complements UX, and used together they shorten work times and improve how information is captured and analyzed, which results in a better product.

Executives should also understand what analytics cannot do. It records behavior, not intention, and it cannot see customers who never reached the site or those who contacted the company by phone. It is subject to consent rules and to the blocking of tracking by browsers, so figures are an approximation. And correlation is not cause. If conversion rises after a redesign, it may also have risen because the season changed. Companies avoid these traps by running controlled tests where possible and by reading the data alongside qualitative evidence. For a broader list of changes that routinely improve experience, see our article on the top 7 UX changes to consider for your platform.

What this means for the C-level

For the chief executive and the chief digital officer, the first decision is to treat the digital experience as a managed asset, with owners, indicators and a regular review, and not as a project that ends at launch. A small number of indicators, such as engagement rate, conversion by channel and abandonment by step, reviewed every month with the same people, produce better decisions than a dashboard with fifty metrics that nobody reads. For the chief marketing officer, analytics clarifies which channels bring visitors who engage and buy, and therefore where to put the budget, linking attraction to conversion.

For the chief commercial officer, the site is a sales channel, and its funnel deserves the same scrutiny as a sales pipeline. For the chief financial officer, a measured improvement in conversion or in the share of completed checkouts translates directly into revenue without additional acquisition cost, which is a source of efficiency. For service and customer experience leaders, analytics shows what visitors search for and where they get stuck, which indicates what the support team will be asked tomorrow. The unifying question is whether the organization can explain, with evidence, how customers experience its digital channels, and what it will do about it.

How to start on Monday morning

Begin with one journey that matters, such as buying, requesting a quote or booking an appointment, and draw it as a sequence of screens. Check that your analytics tool records each step as an event and that the final goal is marked as a key event. If not, fix the measurement before analyzing anything else.

Next, look at the three numbers that tell you where the journey leaks: how many people begin it, how many finish and where the largest drop occurs, separately for mobile and desktop and for each traffic source. Pick the biggest leak, form a hypothesis about why it occurs and validate it by watching five real users attempt the task. Make one change, measure for a few weeks and record the result. Repeat the cycle. After two or three rounds, the team will have a rhythm of evidence-based improvement and, more importantly, a shared language between design, marketing and sales.

How ICX helps

ICX Consulting is a customer experience and commercial strategy consulting firm headquartered in Miami. We help companies connect digital behavior with business results, defining the indicators, configuring the measurement and running the research that explains the numbers, so that experience improvements are prioritized by their effect on revenue and cost to serve. Our user experience practice includes UX research, UX optimization and usability and accessibility.

To evaluate your site or app before investing in changes, use the Heuristic Tests Toolkit, which gives you a structured way to find usability problems that your analytics can then help you quantify.

Frequently asked questions

Is Universal Analytics still available?

No. Google stopped processing data in standard Universal Analytics properties on July 1, 2023, and ended access to them in July 2024. Companies now use Google Analytics 4, and historical data must have been exported if it is still needed.

What metrics should a UX team watch first?

Start with engagement rate, conversion by traffic source and device, and abandonment at each step of the main journey. These three show whether visitors are interested, whether channels bring the right audience and where the experience fails.

Do I need a UX specialist if I already have analytics?

Analytics shows where problems occur, but not why. A UX specialist interprets behavior, tests explanations with real users and designs solutions, so the two roles are complementary rather than interchangeable.

How do consent banners affect analytics data?

When visitors decline tracking, the platform sees less of their behavior, and reports become an estimate of the total. A clear, well-designed consent experience helps preserve data quality and builds trust with users.

How often should a leadership team review UX and analytics data?

Monthly for a small set of indicators tied to revenue, and quarterly for a deeper review that includes user research. More frequent checks are useful during launches or campaigns, but constant monitoring tends to produce reactions to noise.

Conclusion

Used together, analytics and UX turn a website from a static brochure into a system that learns. Analytics shows what people do, UX explains why, and the combination allows leaders to invest in changes that improve both the customer experience and the results of the business. If your digital channels generate traffic that does not become revenue, request a diagnostic with an ICX consultant and we will help you find where the experience is losing value.